No, it's not natural. Our ancestors got on peaceably enough. More traditional societies living today don't seem to suffer from it. Our younger generations today, raised in a more multicultural society, seem to have much less if it.

As far as I can tell, it's pretty much entirely a white person thing, and pretty much entirely directed toward ethnicities who originally hadn't heard of Jesus and couldn't defend themselves against the massive armies of people who had.

But scumbag fathers teach scumbag sons... It'll be around a while yet (viz. the Euro final this weekend gone).

*carries on speaking in propagandist cliche*
I picture you typing this in foetal position, sucking your thumb, rocking a little, whispering "Everything's okay. Everything's okay."

I think that the idea of loss of self is extremely interesting because it involves thinking beyond the most usual boundaries, and, of opening up to the idea of going beyond. — Jack Cummins

There's also the loss of self suffered by some schizophrenics who cease to be able to differentiate between internal and external events. This is accompanied by a defect in the posterior cingulate cortex, one of several parts of the brain thought to be responsible for our sense of self.

Another is the anterior cingulate cortex which is responsible for evaluating social processes. I think this is a big clue about what the self really is. Shallowly, it is the object of self-reflection and self-awareness: not the differentiation between you and your environment but your awareness of this differentiation, of your distinctness which allows you to be an object of your own subjective appraisals.

But deep down I think it's probably a feature of social behaviour, related to the theory of mind and empathy: an ability to empathise with (real or hypothetical) others' (real or hypothetical) evaluations of us. There's an element of mind-reading with scattershot effectiveness in social interactions in humans... What you see when you read the mind of another but they're thinking about *you* is self.

For the vast majority of people, there is no distinction between sex and gender. For you, the pronoun denotes gender roles and identities, not birth sex, while for most that distinction doesn't really exist. I agree that people who deliberately use the wrong pronoun are prejudiced people, but then I don't think accusing people of using pronouns in the way they've been taught as weapons when there are more obvious and realistic reasons why someone might not care to make pronouns an individualist concept is any better.

free market capitalism doesn't care what gender or color you are, it only cares about money — MikeListeral

Utter nonsense. Doubling the employee pool was a boon for employers. It still needed to be forced to do it. If there's a way it can get away with paying any demographic less, it'll do it. It'd help if you stopped talking in propagandic cliche.

Any examples of what these additional senses are, over and above the five we're taught at school? — Wayfarer

*gives essay about more than five senses*

Thanks, but failing to see how that is germane to the attempt to explain reason in terms of sensation. — Wayfarer

:meh:

&

https://www.livescience.com/60752-human-senses.html

And according to the deconstructionist, the Bible is definitely irrelevant for modern times living, because it had been written thousands years ago. Everything has changed. Historicism doesn't work for the present time ...etc. Interesting thoughts and methods, I would say. Great system for art critic analysis of course. The traditionalist will not approve it of course for obvious reasons. — Corvus

Indeed. I wouldn't say Feyerband invented post-truth, but his "science fails, therefore God it is" brand of pomo oughtn't to have been difficult to deconstruct. Derrida himself said that deconstruction is not an equaliser. There's a lot more to unpack in a work of theology than in a scientific paper.

Anyway, now we really are derailing the thread. I'm waiting with baited breath to see who Wayfarer and/or 180's seconds will be now that Wayfarer has declined the invitation.

Maybe your definition of deconstruction is different from mine. I understand it as interpreting thoughts, texts and systems from many different aspects. It is not act of "isolation", but rather interpretation. — Corvus

Deconstruction... only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and hierarchies intrinsic to all texts. — Wikipedia

The idea is that by studying a text, we can determine which side of a dichotomy the author favours. This is usually favoured by treating it as a singularity, not as a dichotomy at all. It's not a bad thing, is in fact a necessary thing as writing goes, but means that understanding a text necessitates this "unending analysis", otherwise you are reading from within the same preference, those silent assumptions and biases that the author adheres to.

Or alternatively in Hegelian synthesis, either the thesis or antithesis is implicitly preferred, leading to a synthesis biased toward one or the other.

There's a nice list of quotes about deconstruction on the same Wiki page (deconstruct my laziness there):

t's possible, within text, to frame a question or undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements. — Paul de Man

(and you should listen to him because he's de Man).

the term 'deconstruction' refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message. — Richard Rorty

Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every 'is', or simply from a refusal of authority in general. — Niall Lucy

[Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. — David Allison

The thing you should take from the last three of those is that 'Rorty' is a perfectly good name for a baby girl.

Sorry to derail the thread, but I'm the sole defender of postmodernism on this forum, gotta put the hours in. :)

When you deconstruct something, indeed truths vanishes, and things end up in some possible world. — Corvus

Deconstruction is a method of isolating the assumptions and biases of a text. Are you suggesting that we get closer to the truth by neglecting these, or rather that it feels like we do?

Because I believe we can do far better than nominalism. — Olivier5

I think Isaac's point is that you are doing nominalism, you're just calling it idealism.

I think it's worth letting the experiment run its course, but I don't imagine it will improve anything. I'm guessing the thinking is that it will act as a psychological nudge, to influence posters to write better quality posts by making them a little more self-conscious? Which makes some sense. However the same mechanism will make posters less apt to post well-written but unpopular content, which would be a net loss imo. Or to make them seem unpopular, less respected, therefore giving their posts less weight. It also favours longevity and frequency over quality. And... It's a philosophy forum. We're predisposed to look down on social media antics :) But still worth testing it out I reckon.

wage gap basically just proves that men work longer and harder

main reason for this is because women prefer foamily over work

which means most women want the wage gap to exist.

trying to eliminate it would be very stupid — MikeListeral

The gender wage gap differs by age group and geographic location. For instance, in the UK there is no gender wage gap for full-time workers under 30 years old, while there's a huge wage gap in the US.

Child-rearing does contribute to the onset of a wage gap over 30, since most women still take several years out and this hits their careers hard. One recent push to even this out in the UK was to allow women to share their parental leave with their partners but, when it came to it, women declined. Hopefully over time, as paternity leave becomes more normalised, maternal gatekeeping will wane some and we'll see a more even spread of the personal cost of having children. However, while equality of outcome seems to be a rallying point for feminists and working women over 30, it's probably not top of the agenda for new parents trying to navigate their own lives.

Anyhow, this kinda-equity has been reached with great effort. Until a few years ago, there was a systematic wage gap that could not be put down to post-natal decisions. Women of all ages earned less than their male counterparts in the same role, and had hugely less access to the highest-paid roles. Equal opportunities legislation among other measures made that difference, which makes your statement:

trying to eliminate it would be very stupid — MikeListeral

very stupid.

So if the concept you have in mind is demonstrably post hoc relative the the actual mechanism your brain uses to identify triangles, then it must either be coincidental (possible), or it must be itself a model of the that process, an inference of what's going on (the hidden states) in the subconscious mind, that yields the sensation (interoception) - 'triangle'. — Isaac

You've reminded me of another concept that Kahneman talks about, WYSIATI: what you see is all there is. Despite it being patently obvious that babies don't come pre-loaded with a glossary of ideas for which to identify physical objects (hence the amount of time and money we spend teaching them and buying them brightly coloured toys of different shapes to investigate), we tend to ignore what's absent from us, however important. He talks about this in regard to System 2's refusal to credit System 1 with anything at all, but our insistence on treating educated adults as if they come shrink-wrapped and fully formed is particularly apparent in philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the Rationalists of the Enlightenment.

It makes sense to do this right? — TiredThinker

Yep. But the only thing more abhorrent to conservatives than the state paying for something is the rich paying for something. I think their preferred MO would be to let the poor die, a sort of Thatcherite Darwinism based on the fallacy that if you're not born fortunately that's your manifest inferiority and if I am that's my manifest superiority (see the Monopoly experiment), but that's frowned upon these days (but then again, what isn't? as Royal Tenenbaum pointed out).

Sure. This tune are us, essentially. — Olivier5

Encore!

Not only in mine, that's the hick. — Olivier5

Didn't we just play this tune though?

What you are saying is that "universals" are not as universal as we may think, their limits are hazy, which is true and indeed an important point in that the verification of universals by interviewing locutors is never perfect. You can always find a guy who disagrees somewhere. — Olivier5

Yes, but more than this: we define demarcations of categories individually. Homogeneity of environment, pedagogy, similar objects of experience, and feedback help to make our models similar, while differences in experience and minor differences in hardware will ensure that no two models are identical. It's like DNA... yours is yours, individual enough to convict you of a crime, but similar enough to mine to make us the same kind of object. — Kenosha Kid

I agree that much too much is made of "universals", that they are not as universal as they seem, and they only need to be sufficiently universal, or somewhat homogenous across individuals, not perfectly equal, like in your example of human DNA. — Olivier5

it doesn't make them less interesting to precise and refine... — Olivier5

Oh, of course.

In that sense I agree that precise concepts are not fundamental to our experience. They are derived from it, but in my mind precise concepts are nevertheless useful, and to the degree that they are useful, they aquire reality, if only as useful hypotheses. — Olivier5

Agreed, they are real. Really modelled in your real brain.

(setting aside that circles have a precise conceptual definition, not based on an average of approximate circles) — Olivier5

The former doesn't contradict that our experiences of real, imperfect, circular things is prior to our concepts of circles. A perfect circle is precisely what every near-perfect circle we ever see has in common.

Like other sentient animals, we humans know what we perceive. If we feel hunger or hear a loud noise, we have immediate knowledge of these perceptions. This knowledge is foundational. I don't need to demonstrate that I hear a loud noise in order to know that I hear it. Even if the noise is a hallucination, I still know that I hear it. — Noisy Calf

This doesn't obviously seem to be describing knowledge but consciousness. It is doubtful for instance whether, as a baby, I form a long-term memory that can be recalled to derive higher-order knowledge of a loud noise. Being aware of something instantaneously only doesn't constitute knowledge in my book.

Actually the ever thoughtful T Clark has already applied the right torque:

My understanding of human nature is that, although we are born with capacities and tendencies, almost everything we know we learn. The first months of a child's life are spent creating a world with raw sensory data, their mind's and body's structure and function, and guidance from other people, primarily their mothers and families. To me, that puts the kibosh on foundationalism from the start. — T Clark

It has always struck me that the key skill if Rationalism is not rationality, but fooling oneself into believing that educated, experienced adults come fully-formed.

Or the BDSM version Strictly Come. — unenlightened

Good title. Didn't wanna see it but with a title that good..

I think debates could improve if a limit to the amount posts is established. 2 each should be enough. — Benkei

Having watched two debates in which the first affirmative did little or nothing to affirm anything, leaving the first negative to request the actual affirmation, I suspect the more stringent the number of posts, the fewer debates will go anywhere. Can the arbiter not just use their judgement? Or could posts that fail to affirm/negate not be struck off somehow?

Also, a lot of time is wasted arguing over definitions which, ideally, would be known to both sides prior to their agreeing to defend or attack them. Could the debaters agree on the key definitions before the arbiter introduces the debate? Even better, could the arbiter provide those agreed-upon definitions in the OP for the sake of the baying crowds?

This type of ideology is border line of Nazism and how if we don’t think like you than they need to be brainwashed or removed from society. — SteveMinjares

The trophy for fastest slide into accusations of Nazism when faced with differing points of view just getting your name etched on it, be with you in a moment.

If theology wishes to recede from philosophy altogether then perhaps it will cease to be a philosophical matter. If it wishes to recede from political interference altogether then perhaps no one else will care either. As it stands, religion is found with its grubby nose everywhere, from the transatlantic slave trade to American science classrooms, so it will have to take its criticism and turn the other cheek. Also, in my experience, there are a lot more pro-theism/anti-atheist threads than pro-atheism/anti-theism ones. Are you going to ask the former to shut up as well, or is your

need for political correctness when this topic is discussed — SteveMinjares

very much a case of banning blasphemy on a secular website?

No one ever gives Quakers any shit, you noticed that? Amazing how cool everyone is with you when you're not complete bores about your religion all the time.

If we take a mathematical example, I think we can agree that the number Pi (singular) is not "physical" in the sense that it is not an individual thing out there that people can see or take in their hand, and that the number Pi is therefore an idea. But we can also agree that it is a very precisely defined idea that leaves very little room, if any, for personal interpretation. — Olivier5

Insofar as it translates from linear things like radii to radial things like circle circumferences, pi is pretty important to us, but it's just another real number, one of a category of things we can talk about, in particular an irrational number, something we had to talk about not because the idea revealed itself to the chosen, and certainly not because it is a priori (as a species we've gone most of our existence without any concept of it, something I'm sure that rationalists would opportunistically take as a win for their team), but because of music and astronomy, the study of physical things.

The interest in geometry comes ultimately from defining categories of things in the real world. Circles are all around us, from observations of the Sun and the Moon, to the invention of the wheel which predates Euclid, Archimedes and Pythagoras by millennia. None are perfect, but their _average_ is. Dealing with the category of circles, taking perfection -- the average shape of a circular thing irl -- as a symbol of any referent (generalisation), was a way of making predictions about physical objects and processes (how long does my bike tyre need to be if my wheel radius is R?). Taking this category, or its symbol, to be more fundamental than the real things seems back-to-front to me. It would be like defining all the hues if blue as some imperfection of the more or less arbitrary category of blue.

Yeah, we've moved on even from structuralism even.

The same tends to be true of universals — Olivier5

By definition they _aren't_ idiosyncratic.

What you are saying is that "universals" are not as universal as we may think, their limits are hazy, which is true and indeed an important point in that the verification of universals by interviewing locators is never perfect. You can always find a guy who disagrees somewhere. — Olivier5

Yes, but more than this: we define demarcations of categories individually. Homogeneity of environment, pedagogy, similar objects of experience, and feedback help to make our models similar, while differences in experience and minor differences in hardware will ensure that no two models are identical. It's like DNA... yours is yours, individual enough to convict you of a crime, but similar enough to mine to make us the same kind of object.

my contention is that meaning is prior to language, or rather, that meaning isn’t to be found in language and propositions, but in what the words of those propositions represent. — TheGreatArcanum

Is this really an unsolved mystery in philosophy? I know most philosophers reject postmodernism on grounds of taste, but structuralism is less controversial surely? Bootstrap mysteries...

Everybody does, in actual fact, even those unaware that they do. The human mind thinks in universals. — Olivier5

Butting in, A in this context isn't a universal. It's a category we learn, in this case are taught. We all likely make the mistake of thinking it a universal as a child, but we all learn that it is not.

Categories generally are idiosyncratic. My blue might be slightly different to your blue by virtue of the fact that the range of frequencies I call blue differs to the range you call blue. We might find a boundary colour and disagree as to whether it is blue or green despite the fact that we are staring at the same colour so have that in common. And it isn't just the question of the label to use that we're arguing over: how our brains categorise things affects how we see them. The borderline colour that I call blue will look more blue to me than to you.

My ex-girlfriend wrote lowercase a without it joining at the top such that I read it as a u. Others could clearly see it as an a. Finding a bunch of A in different fonts we're all familiar with isn't going to interrogate much. Finding a bunch of corrupted A might be more telling.

In terms of religion, whether or not a supernatural being created and maintains the universe and has a purpose for doing so, what characteristics this being has (if it exists), and what the relationship is between people and this being. — darthbarracuda

Yeah sure, celestial teapots and whatnot. Not falsifiable and, as such, as equally likely as an infinity of unfalsifiable ideas thought of and not thought of. Each so should be weighted accordingly :wink:

In my view, which is roughly Kantian, the origin and the ultimate aim of the universe are unknowable (a mystery), and any theories about them are unfalsifiable — darthbarracuda

I've been wondering a lot about this. While we've learned a lot about the early picoseconds of the universe, the hypothesised singularity seems to be an epistemological limit. Everything in the observable universe is our epistemological remit, and whatever caused the universe lies outside that.

However it's possible we will yet discover that the universe does encode information about its origin in some way, or even (and this is a little out there but is published science) that we might observe other origins within the visible universe. There might be stricter limits on the number of possible causes for universes than we know (in much the same way we eliminate eternal inflation theories for example). So I'm more open-minded on this, but lean a little towards your conclusion. How it ends... until we have ways to observe the future as we do the past (inconceivable, but so was quantum mechanics for millennia), we might have to let that one go. But this still strikes me as the same kind of thinking as God-of-the-gaps, or more God-of-the-edges. It's based on our ignorance of what is yet to be discovered and the hope that it will never be so.

I think the measurement problem was considered a metaphysical issue but now is looking like a physical one with all these Wigner's friend experiments. The trend goes that that which is the realm of metaphysics (including theology) shrinks with time. I would be less confident in thinking of this as some kind of refinement toward a true meta-physical realm that will shrink no further.

Ah... but they still have the 'hard problem of consciousness' and quantum mystery gaps to keep them engaged for some time. — Tom Storm

:lol:

I think there are claims though that, right or wrong, cannot be determined by science, not because we do not possess the instruments or resources to do so (as would be the case for a flying spaghetti monster), but because in principle they cannot be investigated this way. It is in the nature of these claims to be unfalsifiable. — darthbarracuda

There may well be, but I don't think these would lend themselves well to theological explanation. The usual candidates are morality and self, both of which science is making headway in. But I'm second-guessing when I can just ask you... What did you have in mind?

However, the question talks about how stupid people seem happier in "comparison" to smart people, not about how much happy stupid people are. — Kinglord1090

They seem comparatively stupid and comparatively angry.

If you are using physics to manage the satellite in the sky because it is giving instructions to your car’s GPS. Than that is productive thinking.

If you are studying the mechanics of
a Black Hole and we as a society can’t use this knowledge for everyday use in the near future. Than this research leads you to question your own existence and other psychological problems like depression and anxiety arises — SteveMinjares

This suggests we value commerce over knowledge, and I think that'll depend on the person. As a physicist, I was happier discovering things that may or may not have technological applications but we're insightful more than I am now doing things that are certainly useful but not very insightful. That said, I'm currently moving into a nice cake-having-and-eating territory of doing hopefully insightful, hopefully useful work. Best of both worlds isn't off the table.

I think people like Einstein and Feynman were very happy with their work (if not private lives) but then it came much easier to them than to most. Adding to the world's knowledge seems at least as good an aim as tracking cars to me.

We seem to be living in an era defined by angry stupid people. They don't seem all that happy to me.

If there is any reconciliation to be done between science and religion, it is not by showing that their claims are identical, but that their claims are completely unrelated to each other and belong to separate domains. Religion is not science, science is not religion, and whenever one of them tries to be the other it ends up being really stupid. — darthbarracuda

Gould's 'non-overlapping magisteria' idea, a sort of epistemological separation of church and state. I think this is what theists try to do -- God-of-the-gaps -- but the progression of science tends rob their magisteria somewhat.

Religion can only try to explain, it has zero predictive abilities, and in fact only explains anything by appeal to mystery. — darthbarracuda

Tbf that's true of philosophy :joke: It's all just-so stories; science has the appeal of telling stories about future events in a disprovable way (contrasting with endlessly delayed Armageddons).

Justifiable action is predicated on certainty. — Possibility

I'd just say that's false. That which is stated with justification etc.

Some of us just hold ourselves (and/or others) to a more rational standard. — Possibility

The irony is that believing any of your actions are based on a justification schema of certainty is completely irrational.

The principle is simple. It is one thing to say you don't know if any kind of deity exists or not. It's another thing entirely (as Hitchens might say) to be neutral on specific claims made regarding a specific deity's views about morality; who you should sleep with and in what position; what country should win the war; what you should eat; what days you can work on; what counts as knowledge, the status of women; etc. Agnosticism doesn't have to make one a eunuch. There is a lot of harmful religious practice (not all of it fundamentalist) that demands a response even from the agnostic. — Tom Storm

:up:

But each page is made of the same kind of stuff. There's no ontological distinction between maps of Italy and maps of France. Every mental map, however many different ones there are, are made of the same kind of neurons.

Now my challenge to you is to make sense of the map-territory relationship in monist language. — Olivier5

You've seen an actual map, right? Is it a different kind of stuff than paper and ink combined?

The mind itself can be seen as a geographer, drawing upon a collection of mental maps, constantly updated. — Olivier5

Or a cartographer rather, yes. Good analogy. We make actual mental maps to navigate. These are models of geography, one of many kinds of models of the world made by the brain which we can think of as maps of a kind (a map of how to behave, for instance).

As you say:

It stands to reason that they are written down on neurons. — Olivier5

so the map itself isn't a different kind of stuff.

How many debates have you seen where someone's mind was changed? — Protagoras

That's not the point. The point is to try, and let the observers make their conclusions.

And to be a decent debate there should be a bit of charity and understanding. — Protagoras

Bullshit!

See,if you debate and you think the other sides point is magic or woo,then what's the point of a real discussion? — Protagoras

For the other side to try and convince you otherwise. That's a debate.